f a spoonful of Nescafé. To me, this treat is as decadent as anything I could enjoy at some swanky café at home – who’d have known?!? And I already realize how lucky I am that, as a woman, I also have access to this family sphere. The previous volunteer who lived here, a male, tells me that he’s barely interacted with the women in this house, and that he has never even entered the primary family room (that would be the room containing my new best friend, the woodstove, beside which I rarely miss an evening these days!).After breakfast, I sit in the sun (my face is going to be leather by the time I leave Morocco!) behind the house, enjoying the spectacular view of the mountains surrounding the valley in which Assoul rests, as well as of the community’s fields, which have been plagued by drought during recent years. Sometimes, I’ll catch up on a little reading – either personal or professional, as I had so little free time for either during training – and of course I try to study the language for however long I can stand it! During that time, my presence alone seems sufficient to entertain the children in the house. Although they’re becoming less shy with me now, the girls in particular – Sana and Imane – seem able simply to stand around staring at me (occasionally giggling, of course) for long periods of time, whether I am reading, brushing my teeth, or most interesting of all, tearing through my luggage for the umpteenth time trying to find my stuff! Sometimes I just smile and giggle back. But they are also gradually becoming my teachers as well – speaking to me more slowly and clearly than many adults do, and sometimes pulling out their textbooks and telling me the words for various objects in the illustrations.
Throughout this time, I’ll also hear the family’s several cats (even by my family’s count, the number is not entirely certain) in the background. These are particularly vicious animals when they feel like it. One day I heard one thumping up the back stairs only to realize it was carrying a dead kitten (no doubt for a snack, as were two pigeons whose feathers I saw on the floor a couple of days ago, although in the case of the latter I was simply relieved that, after Imane and Sana had stood smiling as they held the struggling birds outside of the door to my room, at least I was not the one eating them for dinner. That would not have been an anomaly in this country, where some pigeon dishes are even considered delicacies, but I was not ready for it after having seen my potential dinner squawk and struggle to escape!). One of the cats also makes a noise that will often have me convinced there is a growling dog somewhere in the house. And then I have to be prepared at any time when I’ve left the door to my room open for two of the animals to come tumbling in, tearing at each other as though it will be a fight to the death. They already realize that I’m not too keen on physical abuse, so any efforts I make to get rid of them are usually in vain.
So when all that household excitement gets to be a bit much for me, I may go for a walk, run some errands, or visit the office of the community association to whom I report (when I can find the president around). I have recently been reading Living Poor: A Peace Corps Chronicle, Moritz Thomsen’s reflections on his experience as a Peace Corps volunteer in Ecuador during the 1960s. Of course it is a different continent, and no doubt significant aspects of the generic “Peace Corps experience” (if such a thing ever existed) have changed since then, but one thing that he describes of his early days I can relate to quite well: sitting through meetings and social conversations in this language that I barely understand, and simply having my brain shut down. No matter who I am or what I have done in life, for all practical purposes, here, I am a moron! Nevertheless, I am lucky that enough people are patient with me and that, thankfully, this is a culture where greetings alone can go on for more than ten minutes it seems! Even though I’ve never been one for extraneous conversation, and I still struggle to accept the social value of such redundancy (intellectually and culturally, I get it, but it goes against every fiber of my personality!), at least I can hold my own for a few minutes of “Labas? Labas. Kulshi bixir? Labas... L’Hamdullah.” (And maybe a “Sinnag ras shwiya Tamazight!” for the benefit of those people who commend rather than criticize me for what little Tamazight I do know!).
During the afternoons I spend a few hours at the community nedi, the women’s educational and craft center that I have been charged with assisting. At this point, I am simply trying to get to know the women a little better, and increase my capacity for communicating with them. There are sixty-four members total, who alternate attendance days because the building in which they work is so small, and an additional waiting list of forty more. That’s a lot of names to learn when I can’t even remember the language (besides the fact that name recall is not one of my stronger skills even in English)! But they help me out a little, teaching me new words, often related to the various forms of tissage in which they work (mainly knitting and embroidery, although there is also some weaving and crochet), while I review some of my PC-issued manuals or, when my brain can’t take that anymore, work on my own cross-stitch project (no doubt at this point some women think I am only here to do that though!). But there are many possible organizational projects for this group, and I can’t wait until I am better able to get a start on all that!
I have tutoring sessions a few evenings a week with my host father, who is an excellent teacher with a healthy respect for my obsession for understanding grammatical structures. But every day when the sun sets, and the cold air immediately sets in, my host mother Fatima (a woman only two years my senior whose temperament reminds me a lot of my friend Val back in NC) treats me to another pot of warm milk with a jar of Nescafé sitting beside it, and to me, everything seems right with the world, whether the electricity Is going to come on that night or not!
